Commodity Intermediary Chains: Who Is Really Between Buyer and Seller?

Find the buyer and seller before mapping everyone else.

Obtain the exact legal identity of the entity expected to buy and the entity expected to sell. Identify their proposed signatories and the current contract version. A chat group called “buyer side” is not a legal party. A Brazilian producer mentioned in the product description is not necessarily the contractual seller.

Next, identify the promised source of supply and the proposed exporter. Use appropriate company records, including the CNPJ service for Brazilian entities. Keep the legal entity, trade name and role in separate fields. This makes it possible to notice a replacement seller even when the branding and product description stay unchanged.

Reconstruct the claim’s route to the buyer.

For each introduction or forwarded document, record sender, recipient, date, original source claimed and whether the sender had firsthand knowledge. The purpose is to trace the origin of the assertion. Three brokers repeating the same allocation letter are three transmission steps, not three independent confirmations of inventory.

Keep a chronology rather than just the latest participant list. Someone who introduced two parties early in the process may not have made a later payment representation. Where you cannot trace a document further upstream, identify that break. Do not fill it by assuming that the nearest familiar producer must be its issuer.

Build a separate authority register.

For each claimed agency relationship, record the principal, representative, permitted act, source document and validity period. Examine onward delegation explicitly. A person can be authorized to negotiate without being able to sign, and can earn an introduction fee without representing either party. Corporate filings and specific authorizations may be necessary to test the grantor’s powers.

Follow the money without conflating roles.

Distinguish the seller’s receivable, broker commissions, collection arrangements and logistics charges. For each proposed recipient, record who owes the payment, what triggers it and what instrument supports the role. An NCNDA or IMFPA may describe fees or confidentiality, but the acronym cannot establish supply, bank acceptance or authority from all named entities.

If the buyer is asked to send the purchase price to a commission recipient, treat that as a new factual and contractual question. Ask what makes the party entitled to collect the seller’s receivable. Your bank and counsel should assess the arrangement; an investigator should not authenticate private banking details from a screenshot or offer a workaround to agreed payment controls.

Prioritize the link that carries the commitment.

In the fictional chain above, an exhaustive biography of the introducer will not establish the trader’s allocation. The first material gap is the trader-producer relationship. Seek the supporting arrangement and, where authorized, a precise producer confirmation through an independently established channel. Work outward only where another link affects the claim or decision.

Use “documented,” “independently corroborated,” “asserted” and “unresolved” consistently. A document supplied by a participant may establish what that participant said, without corroborating the underlying event. If confidentiality prevents access to the supply agreement, ask what narrower confirmation can lawfully be provided and identify what it would leave unanswered.

Version the chain as the deal changes.

Keep an effective date on the role map and log additions, removals and changed powers. Replacing the seller, producer or beneficiary can change the facts on which earlier diligence relied. Do not transfer an assessment from the old structure merely because the broker says the new company is “part of the same group.”

End the review with the current structure, the material unsupported link and the next source capable of addressing it. Complexity becomes manageable when every relationship has a type and an evidence status. A neat chart without those distinctions is less useful than a short register that openly shows where the trail stops.